Crash Dive

by Martin H. Greenberg

  And . . . faces. Some bearded, some clean shaven, all of them in uniforms of various types and descriptions, but none in uniforms that he recognized. The clothing was so strange. . . .

  “You guys’re the first, you know,” one of the faces told him. It was a young, almost boyish face, grinning broadly beneath a hard-billed cap bearing an eagle and crossed anchors. “The first submariners ever to sink an enemy warship.”

  “Ja,” another face, bearded, and with a high-peaked, black-brimmed cap with a white cover said. “Twelve hundred forty tons. Not so much, perhaps, by our standards, but a most impressive beginning. Most impressive!”

  “Who are you?”

  “Korvettenkapitän Gunther Prien, U-47,” the bearded man replied. “At your service, sir.”

  “U . . . what?”

  “Unterseeboot Forty-seven. A type VTIB submarine of the German Kriegsmarine. A boat somewhat more advanced than yours . . . though not so advanced as many that came after, of course.” He gave a dry chuckle and a wave of the hand that took in the narrow confines of the Hunley. “I still find it amazing that you carried out your mission in . . . this!”

  Long, lean, and shark-deadly, the U-47 crept through the approaches of Kirk Sound’, moving on the surface. Gunther Prien had hoped to strike in total darkness, but the sky was aflame with the cold, shifting curtains of a brilliant aurora display. It seemed a bad omen, but despite the danger, Prien had ordered the U-boat in, sliding across an antisubmarine cable on the inflowing tide and slipping silently past unsuspecting guardships.

  The British base at Scapa Flow was arguably one of the most closely guarded naval bases in the world, but Prien and his U-47 had penetrated the defenses and tiptoed inside, the wolf unsuspected among the sleeping sheep.

  German intelligence sources had provided the location

  of two British battleships, the Repulse and the Royal Oak, and before long he’d spotted them both, black mountains silhouetted against the cold-flaming sky.

  It was just past midnight on October 14, 1939. Every man was a volunteer; Prien had explained their mission the day before, and told them that any who didn’t want to come could be put ashore first. None had accepted the offer.

  “Rohr eins fertig!” Prien called, aiming for the more distant Repulse, three thousand yards distant. “Rohr zwei fertig! Rohr drei fertig! Rohr vier fertig!”

  “Rohr eins, zwei, drei, vier fertig!”

  “Rohr eins! Los!”

  “Los!” The U-47 lurched as the first torpedo slid clear of her bow tubes.

  “Torpedo läuft regular, Mein Herr!”

  “Rohr zwei! Los! Rohr drei! Los! Rohr vier! Los!” Prien held a stopwatch in his hand, watching the seconds tick away. Three minutes, thirty seconds after firing, a distant boom echoed across the water.

  Sirens howled. The base began to come to life. But Prien was not finished yet. He could count on several minutes at least of confusion within which he could continue his attack. Quickly, he gave orders to change the U-47’s heading slightly, aligning her with the nearer Royal Oak. Belowdecks, in the forward torpedo room, the crew worked furiously to reload the tubes. Tube four had hung on firing, a misfire that jammed the tube and rendered it useless, but the others were cleared and reloaded once more. Twenty minutes passed before the U-47 was again ready to fire.

  “Rohr eins fertig! Rohr zwei fertig! Rohr drei fertig!”

  “Rohr eins fertig! Rohr zwei fertig! Rohr drei fertig!”

  “Rohr eins! Los!”

  “Los!”

  “Rohr zwei! Los!”

  “Los!”

  “Rohr drei! Los!”

  Explosions thundered through the anchorage, two in quick succession . . . followed by a third, and then the Royal Oak erupted like an exploding volcano, hurling flaming fragments hundreds of yards across the red-lit water. A magazine had been hit, and the pyrotechnics lit up the harbor of Scapa Flow in a dazzling spray of fire.

  Coming about, then, and still running on the surface as searchlights swept sky and water and British destroyers charged into the fray, the U-47 dashed for Kirk Sound, narrowly squeezing between a guard ship and a stone breakwater before escaping into the open sea beyond.

  “Ja,” Prien said, staring into Barton’s eyes. “We escaped that time. We were lucky.”

  “Luck, nothing,” the boyish-faced man said. “It was superb seamanship and some of the most brilliant, brass-balled courage I’ve ever heard of.”

  “We did not hit the Repulse,” Prien replied. “The first torpedo exploded prematurely, two missed, and the fourth jammed.” He smiled. “We learned later that Repulse was not even in Scapa Row. Faulty intelligence. The vessel we thought was Repulse was actually the Pegasus, a seaplane tender. Most of the British High Seas Reet was gone, in fact.”

  “But your other spread hit the Royal Oak”,” Slattery reminded him. “She went down in two minutes and took eight hundred thirty-three British seamen with her. She was an old battleship, true, and not of much use, but that sinking made you a hero. Every man in your crew won the Iron Cross . . . and you yourself were later awarded the Knight’s Cross, the highest order of the Iron Cross at the time.”

  “We did what we had to do. What we were ordered to do.” A shadow passed behind those cool, gray eyes. “But at such terrible cost. Over thirty-thousand men, three out of four of our comrades in the Ubootwaffe, were killed in the war. My own U-47, the Bull of Scapa Flow, was lost in March of 1941, while attacking an allied convoy west of Ireland. Forty-five men lost. None were saved. . . .”

  Throughout this exchange, Barton was trying to back away, panic rising in his throat. He felt cold, wet iron at his back. “What are you people doing here? How are you here?”

  “Don’t worry, Barton,” another officer in a khaki uniform said. “It’s almost over. We’re here to bring you home.”

  “M-my home is in Norfolk.”

  “Your home, your family, is here,” Prien said. “With us.”

  “With the Silent Service,” the man in khaki said. For just an instant, the man’s face and upper torso dissolved into bloody horror—gaping wounds, sun-bloated and blackened flesh—but then the horror faded and the apparition gazed at Barton with calm, clear eyes. He wore an impressive-looking medal, an inverted gold star attached to an anchor, around his neck, hung there by a blue ribbon decorated with a cluster of white stars. “You volunteered for a mission you knew was near-certain death. You had plenty of opportunity to back out. You stuck with it . . . did what you knew you had to do. Yes, you’re one of us.”

  “This is Commander Howard Gilmore,” Slattery said. “U.S. Navy. He was on the bridge when his boat, the Growler, collided with a Japanese destroyer. . . .”

  Gilmore had miscalculated. He’d thought the other vessel was a Jap patrol boat and angled in for an intercept on the surface, but then the enemy ship changed course and the Growler slammed into her amidships.

  The shock of the collision threw the Growler far over onto her beam ends, and as the two vessels parted, machine-gun fire raked the Growler’s bridge. The assistant OOD and a lookout were both killed instantly; Gilmore was badly wounded. “Clear the deck!” he snapped, as machine-gun bullets continued to clang and shriek off the conning tower. His exec was below the deck hatch, waiting for him to follow, but instead he shouted “Take her down!”

  After an agonizing delay, the exec followed orders, slamming shut the hatch and barking commands. Flooding her ballast tanks, Growler slipped beneath the surface . . . and escaped.

  Commander Gilmore’s body was never found.

  It was February 7, 1943.

  “Gilmore won the Medal of Honor for that action,” Slattery said, “and his cry of ‘Take her down’ became as famous a rallying cry as “Don’t give up the ship.”

  “U.S. Navy,” Barton said, still dazed. “You’re Yankees! Am I a prisoner, then?”

  “Nyet,” a thickset man in a cap bearing a gold star on a red band said, grinning broadly. He put his arm over Slatte
ry’s shoulder, and laughed. “Nyet, tovarisch. You are not prisoner by any means. We are all comrades here. Brothers-in-arms. Some of us, we may have been enemies in life. But now . . .”

  Slattery smiled. “Mr. Barton, meet Captain First Rank Gennadiy P. Liachin, commanding officer of the K-141, the Kursk. . . .

  The nuclear-powered SSGN Kursk, K-141 (Project 949A) was a huge vessel . . . 155 meters long and displacing 24,000 tons submerged, but with a top speed of better than thirty knots. Code-named Oscar-11 by NATO, she carried twenty-four P-700 cruise missiles in addition to her complement of torpedoes and ASW rockets, long-ranged weapons designed to strike at enemy carrier battle groups. She’d been launched at Sevmashpredpriyatiye, Severodvinsk, in 1994, commissioned in 1995, and assigned to the 7th SSGN Division of the First Submarine Flotilla of the Northern Fleet. Her home base was the Vidiayevo settlement in Uraguba bay.

  On August 10, 2000 the Kursk left Vidiayevo for exercises in the Barents Sea., On board was her usual complement of forty-eight officers and sixty-three enlisted men, plus five officers of the 7th SSGN Division Headquarters and two civilian designers. Her crew was excellent; not long before they’d been awarded the title of best submarine crew in the Northern Fleet.

  On the morning of August 12 Kursk had requested permission for an exercise torpedo launch, and received the reply, “Dobro.”

  At 11:29:34 Moscow time, an undersea explosion was detected measuring 1.5 on the Richter scale. Two minutes later, a second explosion was detected, this one with a magnitude of 3.5, corresponding to perhaps two tons of high explosive. The explosions were picked up by seismographs as far away as Canada and Alaska and monitored by two American submarines shadowing the exercises, as well as by Russian submarines and surface vessels in the area.

  The damage—caused almost certainly by the detonation of a malfunctioning torpedo—was fatal . . . though a number of Kursk’s crew remained alive, trapped in their icy steel coffin for days as their air supply gradually dwindled. They used a heavy spanner wrench to hammer out news of their survival to rescue vessels against the hull.

  But the rescue never came. Captain Liachin was made a Hero of the Russian Federation. His entire crew was awarded the Courage Order posthumously.

  The scandal of the Russian military’s slow response to the disaster rocked the Russian government from top to bottom, amid charges that the Kursk had sunk as a result of a collision with an American submarine. The disaster also resulted in an unprecedented outpouring of help and cooperation from around the world. By the fourteenth of August, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Italy, Norway, the United States, and a number of other countries all had offered their help in recovery efforts.

  “We are comrades,” Liachin told Barton. He looked around, as though inspecting the Hunley’s dark interior. “We both know what it is to be locked within the belly of these metal monsters, whether they be minnows or whales. We know the risks. We know the closeness of death, each passing moment.”

  Strange. It seemed to Barton that the four men closest to him—Slattery, Prien, Gilmore, and Liachin—were standing with their arms around one another’s shoulders. And others, so many others, crowded in behind, a vast, thronging host of men against the golden glow.

  They were beckoning to him.

  “Wait a minute. Are you . . . are you people saying I’m dead?”

  “Not yet,” Prien said gently. “Not yet, my friend. But it will not be long.”

  “Da,” Liachin agreed. “You will not have so long and hard a crossing as some of my people on the Kursk.”

  Barton tried to scream then but found he could not. There was no air to breathe . . . no air. . . .

  The thronging host of men in the golden light vanished, and he again crouched in darkness. Had he been unconscious all this time? The Hunley lay on the bottom, hull canted to starboard, and water was streaming in from somewhere forward. The interior space was already half filled. Someone shrieked nearby in blind panic, voice strangling in the foul air.

  “Easy lads!” Dixon’s voice called above the tumult.

  “We gave it a good go. We gave it our best. . . . I’m sorry. . . .”

  But the sound of rushing water drowned Dixon’s voice, drowned even the screaming, the desperate hammering on the iron bulkheads. The golden light was back, and Barton again looked past the cold and watery embrace of the Hunley s hull, past the water of Charleston Harbor, past the world as he knew it.

  “Well done, lad,” a bearded man said. Barton recognized Horace Hunley, standing in the throng with the others. “You and your crewmates proved the idea of the submarine. You . . . we are the first of the Silent Service. Of this silent company . . .

  And there was Maury . . . and Coleman . . . and DeWitt. They seemed to be stepping up out of the Hunley, joining the waiting throng, men welcoming them with open arms. Coleman grinned at him and waved. “C’mon, Tom!”

  He was hallucinating. He knew that, now. Maybe he did have the sight, like his grandmother said, but there was no way he could see the ghosts of men who hadn’t died yet, who hadn’t even been born yet. Time could not possibly be so far out of kilter.

  “You’re the last one alive,” Gilmore said. “Come on over, Tom. It’s time.”

  “No! No! You’re not real! Not real!”

  It seemed that Prien was stepping closer, embracing him by the shoulders, then handing him a small device on a ribbon. It was an oddly shaped cross. . . .

  “Perhaps this means little to you now,” Prien said, “but you will come to understand. This is Das Ritterkreuz des Eisemen Kreuzes . . . the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. I confer on you now, Seaman Tommy Barton, the name of Ritterkreuzträger, a wearer of the Knight’s Cross.” He smiled, with a hint of irony on cold lips. “Congratulations, comrade!”

  And then the host was gone once more.

  How long had he lain here, trapped in the belly of the submarine? He didn’t know, couldn’t know . . . but he suspected now that for some hours he’d been reliving the events of that night again, reliving events as a drowning man sees his life flashing before his eyes.

  The Hunley was silent now, filled three quarters with black, cold water. Barton floated in the water with his head in the aft hatch tower, gulping down the last few breaths of air remaining.

  Yes. Imagination. The silent, thronging company, the whispers in the dark, those odd visions of strangely clad men, of impossible submarine vehicles, of unimaginable violence and carnage . . . it all had been in his mind, the sanity-leeching ravings of a brain starved for oxygen and on the point of death. . . .

  “Jesus, Frank! You’re gonna get in real trouble!”

  “Maybe,” the man said grimly as he clambered down off the scaffolding. “But I had to see. Just a peek, y’know?”

  “Damn it! No one’s supposed to open her up! Not yet!”

  It was August 8, 2000, and the wreck of the CSS Hunley, discovered on the bottom at last after a century and a half, had been lifted from the waters of Charleston Harbor. Tomorrow she would be placed in a seawater tank to preserve her while the Submerged Cultural Resources Unit of the National Park Service decided how best to honor her crew and display the proud vessel declared missing in action for so long.

  Frank looked shaken, his face white. He looked for a moment across the gray waters of the bay, at the lone sentinel of Fort Sumter.

  “So,” his friend said, “whadja see?”

  Frank shuddered. “There’s bodies in there, Pete. Skeletons. There’s one kind of crammed up against the aft hatch, like he was tryin’ to get out.”

  “Well of course there’s skeletons,” Pete said. “Those poor guys couldn’t get out, so where else would they be?”

  “Yeah.” Frank sounded subdued, and very thoughtful. “I used to be in the submarine service, you know.” He stared at something in his hand. “Back in my Navy days. I got out, though. Couldn’t stand the crowding.”

  “No kidding? Hey. What do you have there?”

 
Frank opened his hand. “I don’t know. A souvenir, I guess.”

  “Shit! You asshole! You’re gonna get us all fired!”

  “Nah. It’s just a trinket. The Park Service Johnnys’ll never miss it.” He held the object up for the other to see, a bit of cross-shaped metal heavily corroded and encrusted with mud and rust. “Some kind of religious medal, I think. It was clutched in that guy’s hand.”

  “Funny,” Pete said, taking the ornament and turning it in curious fingers. “Almost looks like an old Iron Cross.

  You know, like the Germans used to award their war heroes.”

  “Yeah.” Frank continued staring across the water. He could hear something in the distance . . . like the rustle of dead leaves . . . growing louder . . .

  Single Combat

  JOHN HELFERS

  John Helfers is a writer and editor currently living on Green Bay, Wisconsin. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, his fiction appears in more than twenty-five anthologies and magazines. His first anthology, Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, was published by DAW Books in 1998 and has been followed by several more, including Alien Abductions, Star Colonies, Warrior Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, The Mutant Files, and Villains Victorious. His most recent nonfiction project was coediting The Valdemar Companion, a guide to the fantasy world of Mercedes Lackey. Future projects include editing even more anthologies as well as a novel in progress.

  October 18, 2042, 2343 Hours, Greenwich Mean Time

  Datacom Satellite Over the Northern Coast of France

  SUCCUBUS WAS ON the run.

  The most dangerous computer virus in the world was on the verge of being wiped out. Its latest attempt to “impregnate” a hardwired military computer system had failed, and the ice, or intrusion countermeasures, had been hounding it across tens of thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable, up and down dozens of satellite uplinks.